Educated in Calcutta (B.A., 1959) and at the University of Cambridge and Cornell University (Ph.D., 1967), she taught English and comparative literature at the Universities of Iowa, Texas, and Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania .Spivak’s and at Columbia University. She was appointed University Professor at Columbia in 2007.

In 1976 Spivak published Of Grammatology, an English translation of French deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology was published in 1976De la grammatologie (1967). In a series of later essays Spivak urged women to become involved in, and to intervene in, the evolution of deconstruction deconstructive theory. She also urged her colleagues to focus on women’s historicity. Critical of “phallogocentric” (imperalist imperialist as well as Marxist) historical interpretation, Spivak accused “bourgeois” Western feminists of complicity with international capitalism in oppressing and exploiting women of the Third Worlddeveloping world.

Her critical writings include In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987), The Post-Colonial Critic (1990), Thinking Academic Freedom in Gendered Post-Coloniality (1992), and Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993). She also published Imaginary Maps (1994), a collection of translations of Indian short stories, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), Death of a Discipline (2003), and Other Asias (2005).